Sleater-Kinney's New Lineup Plays "Worry With You" On 'Colbert': Watch

The last time Sleater-Kinney played with former drummer Janet Weiss, it was a late-night TV performance. On The Tonight Show two years ago, the three members of the band, alongside Sky Larkin leader and touring member Katie Harkin, played “Hurry On Home,” the single from their album The Center Won’t Hold. Two weeks later, Weiss announced that she was leaving the band. Sleater-Kinney are functionally a duo now, and last night, they gave their first late-night TV performance to promote the new album Path Of Wellness. This time around, the band looked very, very different.

Last night, Sleater-Kinney were the musical guests on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, and they sent in a video of themselves playing in what looked like an indoor skate park. Brownstein and Tucker played the Path Of Wellness single “Worry With You,” and they had a full four-piece backing band: One singer/guitarist standing right behind them, and a bassist, drummer, and keyboardist off in the background. Simply having a bassist marked a break for Sleater-Kinney, and it’s also surprising to see a version of the band with dudes in the lineup.

We don’t yet know whether the version of Sleater-Kinney from Colbert will be the band’s touring lineup. If it is, then there’s something cool about Sleater-Kinney going the Lynyrd Skynyrd three-guitar-army route. The “Worry With You” performance sounded good, but it didn’t fully catch fire. That’s not exactly a problem. If you’ve been to enough Sleater-Kinney shows, then you know they generally don’t really start raising goosebumps until they’re four or five songs in. Given what I saw the last time Sleater-Kinney toured, they are still fully capable of kicking ass live, and it’ll be fascinating to see what their current lineup can do when it really gets going. Watch the performance below.

Path Of Wellness is out now on Mom + Pop.